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Big Hairy Ian writes, quoting the BBC: "A DNA analysis shows that the number of creatures began to decrease much earlier than previously thought as the world's climate changed. It also shows that there was a distinct population of mammoth in Europe that died out around 30,000 years ago. ... Dr Dalen worked with researchers in London to analyse DNA samples from 300 specimens from woolly mammoths collected by themselves and other groups in earlier studies ... [The researchers] speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."

Scientist keep changing their mind on things! It's big science that's supporting research that shows that AGW is not the root of all evil! Wait, no.... it's liberal academics who are polluting our childrens's minds with nonsense like wholly mammoths not being hunted to extinction by savage humans!

I'm confused. Someone please point me to the right meme I'm supposed to employ against evil scientists here. Help me, Bill O'Reilly!

Elephants -- close relatives of the mammoth -- are not grass grazers. They eat trees.

Not all elephants eat trees. In fact, not all elephants eat the same type of food all year round. They have behaviorial plasticity, and a relatively broad range of dietary possibilities. This helps them survive once-in-a-decade dry years (or wet years), which would occur in most elephant's lifetimes once between birth and sexual maturity.

Also, as you say, elephants are "close relatives" of mammoths ; not identical twins. S

Not considering their trunks, when talking about elephants, is a pretty major omission. All that brain needs something to supply it with sensation and to demand it's attention. Not being a proboscidian biologist by trade, I don't know how much of an elephant's brain power goes to it's trunk ; but I bet it's a lot.

>> point me to the right meme I'm supposed to employ against evil scientists

Try this: Those dumb scientists are blaming climate change for everything, including killing the Mammoths.

It was obviously all the SUV's that Cro Magnons were driving.

I think we should be blaming the cooking process. You know how much wood you have to burn to cook a freaking Mammoth? Not only is that carelessly discharging green house gases, at the same time it is destroying the best carbon sequestration system ever... trees! And don't forget that the Mammoths themselves released massive amounts of green house gases with each thunderous fart!All of this could have been avoided if the species in question simply evolved a less tasty flavor profile!

Good parody up until the last line. I don't think anyone who actually uses "Scientists are always changing their minds" are confused about anything ever. It takes like a microsecond for cognitive dissonance to kick in. Have you ever confronted someone with data that runs contrary to their established worldview? Usually not even a flicker of doubt crosses their face. Any "deep in thought" processes that go on are searching for a reason to throw out the new, unwelcome bit of data rather than considering it.

It's not specific to climate change deniers or conservatives obviously. I had a similar reaction last night to a deeply catholic friend's saying that natural family planning was the most effective form of birth control. I caught myself immediately going to wiki, which backed up his statement, and then I immediately decided no, they were both definitely wrong, I just needed to dig deeper to establish the truth, that NPF was a catholic conspiracy to make more catholic babies. So, we all suffer from it, or at least I do and so do other closed minded idiots. Don't try to prove me wrong on this point!

Absolutely false, laws are not "facts", they are uesful generalizations and most scientific laws have many exceptions.

You want examples? Ohm's Law, Hooke's Law, Charles Law, Boyle's law are all linear approximations that many materials obey but real world materials have higher order terms and some materials have *opposite* behaviour.

Second law of thermodynamics, one of the most useful laws, applies to closed systems, but there are no truly closed systems.

Coulomb's law, applies to electrostatic system but there are no pure electrostatic systems in the universe, it is approximation and so there is "the electrostatic approximation"

#1 thing to keep in mind: laws and theories refer to the same thing. Laws are just a historical anachronism when people used to call things laws of nature any time they found out a rule that seemed to be invariable in nature. Buoyancy, F=ma, etc.

#2 thing to keep in mind: theories are not just guesses. They are statements about how some things supposedly work, based on our current understanding of related things. They are fully independent of scientific facts, which are data. Sometimes though, theories and facts have the same name, but refer to different things. Example: the theory of evolution, and Evolution. The theory of evolution lays out how we think creatures evolve. Evolution is the fact (the data collected) that creatures evolve.

#3 thing to keep in mind: linguistically, a hypothesis and a theory is the same thing. In scientific vernacular, a hypothesis is what you have before you have data. A theory is what you have once you have collected some data and have the ability to support your theory with more than "cuz I say so."

#4 thing to keep in mind: laws, theories, hypotheses - all of these can and will be changed once data shows that they're not correct anymore. That is the hallmark of science. We've just gotten so used to things having been nailed down so well that they haven't been updated in a long time. That doesn't mean that they can't be in the future.

Look, who's the bigger villain, humans with their penchant for turning anything that moves or doesn't move into a ___burger or climate change that is the current boogeyman?

Who knows? Let's face it, any number of factors from volcanoes to natural predators to climate change to caveman barbeques all likely shared guilt. The world isn't black and white and people need to stop thinking of everything as having a singular one dimensional true answer.

The galapagos tortoises were indescribably delicious. They all got eaten on the way back to Britain, where they were being taken for the purpose of scientific study and preservation. Not sure about the PP, but it was hunted for food. Being delicious is only an evolutionary advantage if the species is also domesticable.

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:Captain James Colnett of the British Navy wrote of "the land tortoise which in whatever way it was dressed, was considered by all of us as the most delicious food we had ever tasted."[108] US Navy captain David Porter declared that, "after once tasting the Gallipagos tortoises, every other animal food fell off greatly in our estimation... The meat of this animal is the easiest of digestion, and a quantity of it, exceeding that of any other food, can be eaten without experiencing the slightest of inconvenience."[81] Darwin was less enthusiastic about the meat, writing "the breast-plate roasted (as the Gauchos do "carne con cuero"), with the flesh on it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent."

Wrong, allowing your self to become domesticated is the key to genetic success. So for example horses which are not widely eaten are doing well. On the other hand zebra's which are virtually undomesticatable not so much.

A BBC story reported that one croyologist said in late 2007 or early 2008 "At the rate it's going the Arctic could be ice free by 2013." In 2007 the Arctic sea ice extent minimum was 4,140,000 km^2, 22% or 1,190,000 km^2 less than the previous record low.so yes, at that rate it could have been gone by 2013. No one asked him if he thought that would actually happen though and most of his colleagues would have called it ridiculous. Latching on to that is really just a case of quote mining and ignoring the

Can we not contribute to the confusion between climate and weather, please? I mean, we're mostly technically literate people here and can appreciate the need to stick to agreed-upon definitions of words, right?

""The picture that seems to be emerging is that they were a fairly dynamic species that went through local extinctions, expansions and migrations. It is quite exciting that so much was going on," he told BBC News."

The idea that they were a dynamic and occasionally migratory species, yet died out because they couldn't find GRASS seems a little odd. I mean, it's not like the last Ice Age ENTIRELY covered the planet with glaciers.

Interestingly enough, I read an article about human lifespans and how it changed drastically about 30,000 years ago, giving us grandparents who were able to help spread knowledge across generations. Maybe if people were living twice as long, then humans were eating twice as many mammoths.

Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.

Maybe we should be like you, where we know that there's no human-induced climate change because we ignore the unprecedented rate of change in temperature over the past 2 centuries, and keep all our understanding exactly the same as when we were born.

Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.

Maybe we should be like you, where we know that there's no human-induced climate change because we ignore the unprecedented rate of change in temperature over the past 2 centuries, and keep all our understanding exactly the same as when we were born.

Or we can be like you and keep perpetuating memes about "unprecedented rates of change" and pretend there has never been any change in the climate before the evil humans and their "machinez" came along.

It's estimated that Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200K years. This graph [socialtext.net] shows temperatures for the last 3/4 of a million years. Notice that it was warmer 110K years ago than it is now? So this isn't even

Seriously, we all need to do (a lot) more to avoid poisoning ourselves. Yes the planet is warming. Yes we are contributing to it. Yes we need to work toward ways to mitigate this. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. I find it a little disingenuous to look at the temperatures from the last 1500 years and claim the sky is falling.

They sky isn't falling but the roof is getting pretty leaky. The difference between a couple of thousand proto humans chasing herbivores off cliffs a couple of thousand years ago and 7 billion of the annoying creatures burning anything they can get their paws on is ecologically profound.

The planet will be here long after we're gone. But at the rate we're going it's likely that the entire human experience will be a narrow band of sediment trapped inside an alien archeologist's core sample.

It's not the change that's worrisome, it's the RATE of change that is. Change happens, always has. Climate takes millenia to change, it took thousands of years for the glaciers to retreat, for example. We're changing it measurably in decades, and noticeably in centuries. That's what's unprecedented.

It's estimated that Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200K years. This graph [socialtext.net] shows temperatures for the last 3/4 of a million years. Notice that it was warmer 110K years ago than it is now? So this isn't even "unprecedented" during our time on this planet, let alone before our ancestors climbed down from the trees.

Love the way that graph has such thick lines you can barely read it... And judging by the hysterical captions, it looks like this is a "temperature rise always causes CO2 rise" meme. Those of us in the reality-based community understand that this historical sequence has a physical cause (Milankovich cycles) and don't take it as an absolute rule that prevents CO2 emissions from causing temperature rises...

Anyway, notice that yellow chunk at the far right? That is the development of agriculture. Notice how it

There are a host of things that can reasonably be called "controlled repeatable experiments" within the theory of human induced climate change. You're going to have to narrow down which specific hypothesis you're "concerned" with in the greater theory for me to address you query with an answer more specific than "you're wrong".

The experiment is to examine mammoth remains from diverse areas, to inspect the remains of the ecosystem, to look at the changes in isotopic take-up (a way to measure long-term temperature change) of organisms. If the findings are consistent across multiple you have your repeatable experiment. Just because something can't be done in a test tube doesn't mean it's not an experiment.

Funny that you think the scientific method was used in relation to explaining ice ages and global warming/cooling... Historical sciences are guesses at best and typically have very little to do with the scientific method. This is why they are overturned often and in massive ways. The "faith" that people have put into global warming based on only history and computer models is staggering. And the zeal with which they have attacked anyone who disagrees smacks of burning people at the stake for believing in a round earth. It's closer to politics or religion than science, because a true scientist doesn't care if other people agree with his "side". In a true science, the facts will do that for them.

Of course, now we know that instead of their being no ice in 2013 (as predicted), there is actually so much ice that 20 ships are trapped in the arctic and most of the shipping lines are completely blocked. On the past 2 seasons of Deadliest Catch, they had to go home and take a break for a few weeks because the entire sea was full of ice, the most in 30-40 years.

This stuff is way more complicated than most people think and we are in the early stages of understanding it. To treat anyone as an idiot for having a difference of opinion at this early stage is just mind-blowing. And as for "unprecedented rate of change of temperature"? I don't think.5 degrees over 100 years is that big of a deal, especially when I question the accuracy being good enough to catch half a degree 100 years ago.

Climate changes. With or without man. We see a "fertile crescent" in Iraq that now looks like a massive desert (because they cut down all the trees). We see a California which was a desert which is now Mediterranean (because of man planting lots of trees). We see flash frozen mammoths (and don't know why). We know the earth has recovered from an ice age in the past, so it's pretty darn resilient.

The bottom line is you are right. We should do our best to keep learning because we really don't understand this stuff yet. But vilifying people that disagree and trying to stifle their funding and ruin their careers hampers that effort significantly. And that's what the GP was lamenting.

Funny that you think the scientific method was used in relation to explaining ice ages and global warming/cooling... Historical sciences are guesses at best and typically have very little to do with the scientific method. This is why they are overturned often and in massive ways. The "faith" that people have put into global warming based on only history and computer models is staggering. And the zeal with which they have attacked anyone who disagrees smacks of burning people at the stake for believing in a round earth. It's closer to politics or religion than science, because a true scientist doesn't care if other people agree with his "side". In a true science, the facts will do that for them.

Yeah, we totally don't use science to understand things that already happened, like how the Sun formed, or how life operates, without directly observing those processes.

No wait, those are very well understood concepts in astronomy and biology, and you're a misguided idiot for pretending that science always happens in a test-tube.

a) Historical sciences do in fact use the scientific method: make observations-> make theories-> make more observations-> refine theories.b) Climate science is not at an early stage. A few of the predictions were slightly off, but that just means refining the parameters a little, not throwing out the whole model.

... especially when I question the accuracy being good enough to catch half a degree 100 years ago.

I see this all the time. People assume that just because the precision that the measurements were taken at in the past is somewhat less than it is today that it's invalid to express the aggregation of many of those measurements to a greater precision. This can be statistically shown to be wrong but perhaps the simplest example I can give is this. In baseball a player's batting average is commonly expressed to three decimal places and yet each measurement is a binary choice, either they got a hit (1) or

And one day you will have selectively forgotten that you were such a pro-global warming zealot--long after the gloom-and-doom scenarios didn't materialize and the hippies have moved on to the next environmental fad for hating on humanity.

... when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Changing climates is a bitch for any species, no matter the rate. Evolution is a hash mistress and you get genes that adapt you really well to one circumstance, and when things change, the generalist k-selected species like cockroaches, algae, and e-coli kick your ass.

It's a little disingenuous to say that's similar to what's happening now. Human concerns are for relatively small temperature changes over REALLY REALLY REALLY short amounts of time, that threaten the stable conditions the agro-economies of

The change in temperature from the height of the last glaciation (around 25,000 years ago) to the Holocene is only about +4 Kelvins. The difference between the height of the Little Ice Age and now only about 1 Kelvin. The increase from 1880 to now is about 0.8 Kelvin. It doesn't take a lot of temperature change to cause some pretty drastic changes from a human point of view.

(BTW, being the pedant I am I have to say Kelvin's don't have degrees even though they are the same size as a Celcius degree. Kelvi

You have to separate facts from culture. You have a nice menu of extintion causes [wikipedia.org] to choose from, but culture have other priorities, Dinosaurs are still named antediluvian (from before the flood) or prehistoric (before written history) animals, no matter what killed them. Some of what you said are still potential extintion causes, i.e. for diseases, we have as precedent the black death [wikipedia.org] that killed from 30 to 60% of the population in europe, overpopulation is a ticking bomb, but will not mean extintion, "jus

It is said that ice ages caused the extinction of north america's earth worms, and the re-introduction of european nightcrawlers is destroying our forests by causing a change in the topsoil chemistry.

I say scientists are dumb. Okay, so some worms will till the soil, the nitrogen balance changes, leaves decay faster. These large shifts will impact how seedlings grow and thrive; over time, new seedlings which thrive better in an ecosystem with earthworms will outcompete the ones that take best to a worm-fr

Scientists (in average, at least) are not dumb, but their knowledge is limited. Probably the current ecosystem is not fully understood (at least, going to microbes and even lower levels), and so how fragile is or at least how easy is to go from one ecosystem to a different another is not (fully?) known. But the problem with ecosystem is that we are part of it, most of what we depend on is part of it too. Introducing big changes won't kill all life probably, life eventually adapts, if changes are not too fas

You conflate 'scientists' with small groups of people interested in one aspect off an enormous topic.

"Science" does not have an opinion on what reintroduction off burrowing worms on the NA continent will do. Some people researching the field may have some observations and possibly opinions about the desirability or lack thereof of a particular issue, but that isn't some giant statist conspiracy that you're trying to make it into.

And yes, you CAN make the argument that 'slowing down' or avoiding changes mig

Actually I was paraphrasing the "I think there's some inherent value" quote from an actual researcher whose only reason for wanting to stop the spread of earthworms was that keeping things the way they are is inherently valuable in some unqualified way. He never claimed there would be catastrophic collapse; that's separate, a lot of researchers are saying that the forests may eventually be destroyed by worms changing the nutrient cycle by causing faster consumption of nitrogen resources and integration int

Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.? Anyone remember that one back in the 80's? Man, I'm old.

In case you didn't notice WWIII didn't come (yet) so tens of thousands of nuclear warheads didn't explode all over the world whirling up tons of dust into the atmosphere causing a massive global drop in temperature. The only reason nobody talks about it today is because a full scale nuclear confrontation seems so unlikely, we're still more than capable.

I remember growing up how asteroids, overpopulation, diseases, and shit like that once killed every species that ever went extinct. Now climate change did it all.

Incorrect. SOME mass extinctions were the result of climate change (like when the early anaerobic life produced too much of that poisonous oxygen). Some were caused by gamma ray bursts (which affected the climate by destroying the ozone layer and polluting the atmosphere with oxides of nitrogen), some by asteroids (this particular one was supposed

Well, the known causes of natural climate change point toward slow cooling so human causes are probably more than 100% of the cause of the warming. Both are still operating but anthropogenic causes are overwhelming the natural causes lately.